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Up Close and Kinda Personal
Julián Castro’s memoir, An Unlikely Journey, is out October 16. Parts of it might surprise you. BY GREG JEFFERSON
hellraising leader of the Committee for Barrio Betterment who had the guts to challenge the Good Government League as part of a Chicano slate for city council in 1971? Yup. Her activism, including her organizing muscle, is key to understanding her sons’ politics and the acumen that made them household names here. She raised the twins as a single mother. I know. Driven by Rosie to succeed academically, they graduated from Jefferson High School a year early and earned spots at Stanford and then Harvard Law. Uh huh. Castro decided to run in District 7 when he was still in law school. I KNOW. So I’ll admit to being a little wary when I picked up an advance copy of Castro’s memoir, An Unlikely Journey, which is out October 16. Castro has always been a cautious and calculating politician, sensitive to how he’s perceived. And more than anything else, this slender book – it’s all of 225 pages, maybe because he’s all of 44 years old – is his vehicle for defining himself and his story for a national audience ahead of the 2020 presidential election. In other words, I expected no new revelations about growing up on the West Side or his climb in San Antonio or national politics. I was wrong… ish.
Coloring Inside the Lines The familiar outline of Castro’s life is there as well as the altar-boy-cum-meritocrat notes he likes to strike, often with a sledgehammer. But he adds texture to the story many San Antonians are already familiar with. He writes about his Mamo, for example, as a woman stunted in some ways because she was pulled from school in the third grade – though she taught herself to read and write in Spanish and English – and lived in a household so strict she couldn’t date until she was 32. Finally allowed out, she began seeing an 18-year-old and became pregnant in almost no time. The boy took off, and she eventually delivered Rosie. “[She] was a constant in our lives, always making us delicious meals and telling us Mexican fairy tales about misbehaving kids being eaten. She also drank 40-ounce beers, escorted my brother and me 13 6
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ournalists from national and international news outlets started crowding into City Hall around 2011, late in Julián Castro’s first term as mayor and the start of his second. They wanted to interview this diminutive, low-key overachiever because he was one of the fastest-rising stars in the Democratic Party, the young pol upon whom President Barack Obama smiled. Off to the side were those of us who’d watched his methodical, grassroots campaign for District 7 council seat in 2001, his leadership in fighting the PGA Village, his bitter loss to Phil Hardberger in 2005 and his political resurrection four years later. By 2011, we 10
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Jeremiah Teutsch
knew his and twin brother Joaquin’s life story so well it might as well have been tattooed on our forearms. Still, we measured the visiting reporters’ work against what we already knew. Did you know Mamo, Castro’s grandmother, crossed the border at Eagle Pass with her sister in 1922? And that Mamo, an orphan, was denied a formal education and grew up to clean houses across San Antonio? Yes, I’d first heard that a couple of elections ago. Powerful stuff. That’s how the family stories of many San Antonians start. Did you know his mother, Rosie Castro, was a
Gage Skidmore
